1. Find a small habit to change. (Example: get more sleep).
2. Find a time/place in my daily routine where this new habit will go. ("Immediately after awakening").
3. Think (this might be easy or hard) to quantify a change in this habit. "Lose weight" is easy to quantify. "Be happy" is not. (Easy to quantify sleep, and I round to the nearest quarter hour and I'm not OCD about accuracy. I'm "grenade" accurate).
4. Set it up in Dayta to measure the action daily.
5. Look at the little graph that Dayta generates.
My experience is that I have fewer of the 5 hour sleep nights and more of the 7 hour sleep nights.
I have added "weight loss" to the morning routine successfully.
The next one I added was $ spent at Starbucks. This one cut my coffee spending dramatically. Good for me, not so good for Starbucks.
Now I've added "Hours spent writing" with a target of 1 per day. This one is not so successful (yet) because I haven't found a time to park this habit.
Before this I used a Google spreadsheet and created an icon on my iPhone for the data entry. This was simple, inelegant, and worked like a champ.
Credits:
1. The idea for finding a place to park your change in habit during your daily routine came from an article I read somewhere about a Stanford psych prof (I think) who talked about this being a key to effecting changes.
2. The idea for small changes being successful was from the same source.
3. The idea for starting with a very small set of changes in the daily checklist/routine came from Sebastian Marshall (thanks @lionhearted).
4. The idea for using a Google Spreadsheet with (effectively) a roll-your-own mini web app on the iPhone came from Mr. Google somewhere.
5. The idea of trying hard to not think Brilliant Thoughts but instead accept that other people might have good ideas and I should be humble enough to accept them gratefully came from a friend who is now deceased.
Apps are easy to ignore. A wall calendar is harder to forget about.